Mary Raftery

Mary Raftery was born in Dublin in December 1957. One of four children of Adrian and Ita Raftery, she spent some of her early years in France before returning to Ireland for her secondary education.

She later went on to study Engineering at UCD. At the same time she studied Music at the Dublin College of Music and was regarded as a fine cellist.

Mary did not complete her Engineering degree but, during her time at UCD, she was elected as Education Officer of the Students’ Union and developed an interest in journalism. She went on to work for In Dublin and Magillmagazines.

Mary joined RTÉ as a producer in 1984, working on a range of current affairs programmes. She left RTÉ in 2002 to become a freelance television producer and journalist.

While at RTÉ, she produced the ‘States of Fear’ documentary series, broadcast in April and May 1999, which detailed the shocking abuse suffered by children in reformatory and industrial schools between the 1930s and the 1970s.

The series had a huge impact on the public and, even before the final installment was broadcast, the then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, issued a public apology to the victims of abuse in these institutions. The subsequent establishment of the Ryan Commission and the Residential Institutions Redress Board was largely as a result of Mary’s work. When the Ryan Commission Report was eventually published in 2009, it confirmed the findings of ‘States of Fear’.

In 2002, together with Mick Peelo, Mary produced ‘Cardinal Secrets’ for RTÉ, which examined the handling by the Catholic Church of clerical sex abuse allegations in the Dublin diocese. Again, the programme had a huge impact on public opinion and led to the Government’s decision to establish the Murphy Commission, which reported in 2009.

Mary’s final television documentary, ‘Behind the Walls’, produced in 2011, examined the history of psychiatry in Ireland. It established, amongst other things, that in the 1950s Ireland led the world in terms of the numbers of people detained in psychiatric hospitals and that, on a per-capita basis, it was even ahead of the Soviet Union.

Mary Raftery was a prolific journalist, with a huge appetite for work and a passion about the subjects she covered. She wrote a regular column for The Irish Times between 2003 and 2007.

In 2002, she co-authored – with Eoin O’Sullivan – a book entitled ‘Suffer the Little Children’, a detailed account of Ireland’s industrial school system. In 2010, she wrote ‘No Escape’ for the Abbey Theatre, a piece of documentary theatre based on the Ryan Report.

Mary Raftery was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2010 and continued to work during her long battle with the illness. She died in January 2012 and is survived by her husband, David Waddell, and their son, Ben.